Chalcedon Blog

To this day--and maybe it's because I'm missing something--I still cannot comprehend the fascination with Francis Schaeffer. He's such a towering figure within evangelicalism, and many a reconstructionist found their way to Rushdoony through his ministry, but the telling absence of central doctrines in his system makes we wonder why all the hub-bub. Equally, I cannot understand the further fascination with his offspring both physical and intellectual. Chuck Colson has always been radically opposed to Christian Reconstruction, and Nancy Pearcey--though prolific--lacks those same central doctrines, that in my opinion, handicap Schaeffer's thinking. Her 2004 volume Total Truth: Liberating Christianity from Its Cultural Captivity sports a thesis that sounds very close to Christian Reconstruction. Here's a snippet from the dust jacket:

Does God belong in the public arena of politics, business, law, and education? Or is religion a private matter only--personally comforting but publicly irrelevant? In today's cultural etiquette, it is not considered polite to mix public and private, or sacred and secular. This division is the single most potent force keeping Christianity contained in the private sphere--stripping it of its power to challenge and redeem the whole culture.

However, in the index of this 479-page book there is not a single entry for law, commandment, or covenant. How, pray-tell, shall we develop a Christian worldview, and then use it to redeem the whole culture, without Biblical law or an understanding of the covenant? Is it not the covenant from which any cultural mandate proceeds? The question is not Schaeffer's "How Should We Then Live?," but rather Rushdoony's "By What Standard?" Herein lies the central division between the worldview movement that grew around Schaeffer and the mission of Christian Reconstruction issuing from Rushdoony.

Gary North, in a sizable chapter targeting Schaeffer, touches the Achilles Heel of Schaefferian thinking:

It does not matter how many times a person assures us that he is in favor of Christian civilization and opposed to the humanistic myth of neutrality. If he does not affirm the continuing validity of the biblical case laws, his affirmation in favor of Christian civilization is in vain, intellectually speaking. At some point, his denial of the continuing moral and judicial authority of God’s revealed law will logically force him to affirm some form of natural law theory or common ground reasoning, i.e., the myth of neutrality.[1]

There it is. If Schaeffer, Colson, Pearcey, et al. do not systematically affirm Biblical law, all that they say regarding "redeeming the culture" is intellectually in vain. They are asking how to live without first inquiring by what standard. Even Cornelius Van Til addressed the issue in his The Apologetic Methodology of Francis A. Schaeffer in which Van Til takes his former student to task for his natural law apologetics. This leads to a form of antinomianism that may explain the serious sins of scholarship committed by Schaeffer. His disciples are not aware of his plagiarism where he features near verbatim copies of paragraphs from both David Chilton and Richard Flinn's essays in the Journal of Christian Reconstruction [2].

Schaeffer also borrowed a great deal from Rushdoony's early writings, but he never revealed the source. This would explain the ostensible "reconstructionist" framing of Schaeffer's ideas; and since he was presenting the worldview aspects of reconstruction without acknowledging the standard of God's law, he became a more popular influence on evangelicals than Rushdoony.

Schaeffer was a Presbyterian, but he never defended the Five Points of Calvinism in any of his works[3]. There is a price to pay for this, and it reveals itself in the thinking of the "disciples." I was saddened to read the following interview with Frank Schaeffer where it seems the legacy of his father has waned. Frank sat down with John Whitehead of the Rutherford Institute to discuss the recently published Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back. Here is some of the Q&A:

JW: In the book, you portray your mother as speaking down to her husband, the renowned Francis Schaeffer.

FS: Right.

JW: You also indicate that your father abused your mother.

FS: Right.

FS: Dad had a very strong temper. He and mother had a good marriage, in the sense that it lasted. They had a lot of affection for one another, and they were very dynamic. But there was also, as there are in a lot of human relationships, a very dark side. One of those dark sides came out when they were fighting. My father would yell and scream and throw things. Sometimes, it went beyond that. Basically what I talk about in the book is as much as I want to say about that. People can draw their own conclusions.

JW: You write in the book that your father, for example, threw plants at your mother.

FS: That was no secret. I’m sure other L’Abri workers knew that. Their relationship at times turned violent...

JW: I quote from your book: “I believe that my parents’ call to the ministry actually drove them crazy. They were happiest when they were the farthest away from their missionary work. I think religion was actually their source of tragedy.� What do you mean by that?

FS: What has been interesting is discussing this book with my sisters. All three of them have read it, and they all have various ways of seeing things differently than I do. But I think we all agree that Mom and Dad were happiest when they weren’t in the work of L’Abri...

JW: You write that you remember your dad screaming at your mother one Sunday. Obviously upset or enraged, he throws a potted ivy at her. Then he goes downstairs and preaches the gospel. Is this hypocritical?

FS: I don’t think so, no more than some other L’Abri workers whom I won’t name who have had marital troubles, left their wives and still go around talking about the value of family...

JW: In your book, you said your father could be screaming at your mother one minute and then muttering “I’m going to kill myself� the next. In fact, you write that your father contemplated suicide and spoke about hanging himself. Was Francis Schaeffer suicidal?

FS: I don’t know if he was really suicidal, but he was certainly depressive. My father spent big chunks of his life in very deep depressions, and, again, that is no secret.

JW: In the book, you discuss an incident at L’Abri when your father walked in on you having sex in the nude with the woman who later became your wife. He just kind of walks away from it. Some evangelicals are going to wonder, didn’t Francis Schaeffer lecture his son on premarital sex?

FS: They may shake their heads in disbelief. But my dad didn’t take a moralistic judgmental angle. If it had been a L’Abri student, he wouldn’t have said anything. It’s not that he wouldn’t express opinions on sexuality, but Dad was just not that kind of judgmental person. He had a very strong moral chord but not in terms of a church-lady kind of response to that sort of situation with a teenager.

JW: You paint your family at the end of the day as dysfunctional. You say your sister Susan and her husband lived in an assisted living facility. Priscilla was on Prozac. You were in therapy. You had a problem with name identification—you kept changing your name.

FS: Right. The name change thing is somewhat trivial, but it is symptomatic of something.

JW: Do you believe life begins at conception?

FS: Yes, I believe life begins at conception, both technically and morally. But I also think that in terms of the present American climate, we are not going to be able to have all the abortions outlawed. It is totally unrealistic to push for that. What we need to do is rethink Roe v. Wade. But we don’t need to roll it back in the sense of getting to a place where all abortions are illegal. Thus, my view on the legality question of abortion has changed. But I don’t think my view on the morality of abortion has changed.

JW: Obviously, your feelings about the Religious Right have affected your faith.

FS: My faith is a little more nuanced than it would have been at one time. I am certainly not a fundamentalist. I have a lot of questions and a lot of doubt. I try in the book to give a snapshot of where my own faith would be now, and pretty much that is where I would leave it. But in terms of the fundamentals of the Christian faith, I do believe Jesus Christ was the Son of God. Do I believe in God? Of course. That question should come first. Do I believe all religions have equal values? No, I do not. The further they get from the teachings of Christ, the less valuable they become. On the other hand, I don’t see myself as a fundamentalist because I read the Bible with a lot of questions about what is allegory and what is literal. As a child at L’Abri, I would not have had such questions. I would have just taken everything literally. I certainly don’t focus on the issues in the Old Testament of the creation of the world in six days versus evolution or creationism or intelligent design. None of these things interest me very much.

JW: Are you an evolutionist?

FS: Oh, I certainly believe in evolution. But I always have. Even my dad in the early days of L’Abri said he didn’t care whether the world was created 600 million years ago or 6 million or 6,000. He was very open to the idea of a kind of theistic evolution. Where I disagree with the Darwinian view is that I think it is too limited. How something happened is not an answer to why it happened. The why is because God created it to happen. That is an interesting subject, but my faith doesn’t feel threatened by the world being 600 million versus 6,000 years old. Those things really don’t interest me.

Just a tad disturbing, wouldn't you say? Frank represents a deviation from the faith, and there's a good chance his progeny will further that divide. This is where I'm most puzzled about the great interest in Schaeffer's thought. The Scripture says that "wisdom is justified of her children" (Mt. 11:19), and if the physical and intellectual offspring of Schaeffer are any indication, there are clear problems with some of his presuppositions.

I do understand that a good many people began reading reconstructionist literature after imbibing Schaeffer's teaching. This was not my path, but I realize that a general interest in the Christian worldview is aggressively put forth in Schaeffer's works. However, the obvious absence of the Biblical law, and the departure from Van Til, lessens the value of the system in my mind.

Another comparison is made when I consider the years I've now spent with the Mark Rushdoony. It's been a great learning experience for me witness his commitment to his father's system. I have received more than a few rebukes for him for the slightest deviations from his father's thought. Mark is thoroughly "Rushdoonian," and his lovely wife Darlene is more like a pastor's wife in her undying commitment to Chalcedon's supporters.

I am doubly blessed by my friendship, and working relationship, with Chalcedon vice-president, Martin Selbrede. As Mark Rushdoony has noted, "Besides Gary North, no other person knows my father's works as Martin does." I've often referred to Martin as "the best kept secret in the Kingdom of God," and the only man living that can truly continue the intellectual work of R. J. Rushdoony. If I could describe Martin, I'd say he was a delightful blend of the conceptual creativity and vast knowledge of Rushdoony mixed with the polemical muscle of Greg Bahnsen. I'll be featuring video of his recent lectures in the weeks to come, and we're presently digitizing over 400 of lectures into an mp3 format.

About three years ago, Mark Rushdoony and I sat around a space heater in his father's library talking about his father's legacy. I said to him, "Mark, your dad produced so much in his lifetime, and he had a wife and five children to care for. Were you neglected? I mean, did you grow up with a 'PK' (Preacher's Kid) complex? What did you and your siblings think of your father?" I was not expecting his answer. In fact, I've never heard such an answer.

His eyes began to tear, and he said, "Chris, my sisters and I were in awe of my father." I couldn't help but tear up myself. I've heard of kids being proud of their fathers, or the usual "my dad is my hero," but I've never heard someone use the descriptive "awe" in reference to their father.

Rebecca, Mark's oldest sister, and the woman most likely to answer the Chalcedon phone, described her childhood with her father this way:

My father loved large, noisy family gatherings where he spent hours sharing his stories and wisdom with us. He loved the noise of his children and grandchildren talking, laughing and sharing, and would often sit back listening to their chatter, smiling. “Very good, very good,� he would repeat. He understood that his legacy would continue in their lives. The first few family dinners after he passed from this world were very quiet in comparison, and I can remember sitting there wanting so badly to hear one more story, one more joke.

My father’s libraries were always a special place we entered with the reverence of church. In Santa Cruz, Dad’s library was at the back of the house in a beautiful room with parquet floors and a large bay window that had a window seat. There were rows and rows of bookcases with aisles just narrow enough to walk through. It was a place of refuge for me. As the oldest daughter I spent a lot of time helping and watching my little brother, Mark (a handful, I might add), and three little sisters, Joanna, Sharon, and Martha.

Dad understood that I sometimes needed to have time away from them and would help me hide between the rows of bookcases with a book to read. It was there, hidden in his library, I read Moby Dick, David Copperfield, and many other classics from his library shelves with Dad sitting just a few feet away sharing my secret. It was there too that I learned one of Dad’s sweetest and most endearing habits. Often as he sat writing he would absentmindedly repeat the names of those he loved. What a joy it was for me to hear him softly repeat “Rebecca, Rebecca� as he worked.

When my siblings and I were small, Dad would often borrow small toys that we found special and set them on his desk. They would sit there for a time and be returned or disappear into the niches in his library. Many of them were packed away and moved from house to house, finally finding a place in a drawer or tucked away on a shelf in his library here in Vallecito, California.

What a joy it was to find these small remembrances of our childhood in his library. For me, finding several of the tiny wooden Chinese and porcelain figures I loved as a child brought a flood of memories of happy times spent with my father and the joy of finding a childhood treasure. With each treasure we relived the memories, laughed, and shed tears of joy and thanksgiving for the loving record he had kept for each of us. Small treasures and letters which would have been lost are now mine again to share with my granddaughters. They are time capsules of a father’s love. He was not a man who sought wealth, but he did leave behind for his children a record written and physical of the life God had blessed him with.

I can't help but surmise that the theologies of great men have a great deal to do with their domestic lives and their progeny. The Schaeffer home is a sad tale, and Frank's testimony demonstrates a personal confusion partly derived from the fact that "ministry" often dominated family. There is no doubt Francis Schaeffer was passionate about his calling, but again, the central missing ingredients do eventually show their results. And, by Rebecca's memories, you do not see in her father an overbearing Taliban-like cleric, but a loving patriarch "of whom the world was not worthy" (Heb. 11:38).

I am surrounded by the legacy of Rushdoony, and for that reason, I am a man most blessed. Am I saying he's perfect? Am I engaging in a form of idol worship? Well, I don't have the energy to answer such questions. My short answer is, "Try and show some respect!"

Besides the Rushdoony family and Chalcedon staff, you've never encountered a more glorious body of people than the Underwriters of Chalcedon. Some of these darling families have financially supported Chalcedon since its founding in 1965. At our recent conference in North Carolina, I met the Wilson--a couple that participated in the original Bible studies Rushdoony hosted in the 60s. These folks are still passionate, and I must say, they challenge the commitment of all of us as to how serious we are to the future of Christian Reconstruction. I am both honored and humbled by all those who keep us going.

What else can I add? I could share a great deal more, but I won't. I hope to have Rebecca on the podcast soon to talk about the more personal side of her father. It goes without saying that we are all disgusted by the slanderous way in which Rushdoony is described by the arm chair critics in and out of Christian circles. Interviewing those who knew Rushdoony intimately present a much different man. It is my opinion that men hate Rushdoony because they hate the implications of his thought. In that sense, men hate him because they hate God's requirements.

I'll leave you with a small bit of profitable advice from our bumper sticker:


1. Gary North, Political Polytheism: The Myth of Pluralism (Tyler, Texas: The Institute for Christian Economics, 1989),175.
2. Ibid., 193ff.
3. Ibid., 168.